[Diogenesian]

Specifically my claim is "the relatively minor productivity uplift I would personally get out of agentic development is offset by the high cost, along with unresolved questions about long-term code maintainability, so I am not convinced that it is actually beneficial."

IMO the bigger problem is that ~1.5x individual dev productivity uplift seems to translate into 1.05x uplift across the team. People have been waaaaayyyyy too overconfident about this stuff.

[breadzeppelin__]

I am both a career developer and experienced team manager. from first hand experience the 1.5x im getting from AI is not flowing down to my team / org because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming. That additional 50% productivity goes completely to side projects built on my second computer between 9-5 tasks

[Diogenesian]

Actually, the METR report speculates that some of the overreported productivity uplift comes from grabbing unnecessary low-hanging fruit, things like "oh I'll make a web dashboard to keep track of this stuff // wow that would have taken all day without Claude!" But in the olden days they would have just used a notepad. Yet psychologically they built a real thing and saved a lot of time.

[breadzeppelin__]

True I have made a few low tier apps that just hit apis that were previously obfuscated deep in menus that have had an outsized impact

[thaumasiotes]

> But in the olden days they would have just used a notepad. Yet psychologically they built a real thing and saved a lot of time.

There was an old Onion article about the monetary savings from buying clothes on sale as computed by (a) the women buying the clothes; and (b) their male relatives.

[dawnerd]

That’s what I’ve heard from my dev team too. They’re using it to give themselves free time while still being on the clock, not to produce more output for the company. Roughly thinking about hours spent on projects I think have gone up per task, the opposite that should be happening.

[strken]

I'm finding it almost impossible to fill that free time with work, unless it's just reading emails and chat messages.

I can context switch between two or three chats, but doing so speeds up my agent use at the cost of making reviews and discovery harder, so it might come out in the wash.

[windward]

>I can context switch between two or three chats

I'm finding this is a skill which I'm slowwwwwwly improving but, for now, my level means I tend to miss mistakes I'd notice if just working on one task. I also had to make accommodations to the way I work to make it achievable, including telling my employer that a 500 GiB disk just isn't enough any more when I need multiple builds in parallel.

[dieselgate]

Your comment makes total sense to me but generally, in regards to productivity gains from AI, I can never understand where these are realized for people. Maybe I'm just a laggard but never found myself 25%-50% behind on anything or that much more work/items/tickets available.

[ra0x3]

Great point. Devs have relatively no incentive to be more productive for their orgs, and all the incentive to be more productive on their own personal work. The AI benefit to devs is real, just not for large enterprises IMO outside of automating clerical/mundane work.

[Aurornis]

> Devs have relatively no incentive to be more productive for their orgs, and all the incentive to be more productive on their own personal work.

AI definitely supercharges the side project myth, but I think we’re going to see waves of developers quitting or losing their jobs because they’re chasing dreams of running a side code project that isn’t going to turn into a business.

The incentive to be more productive at work is that they get to keep their job and not be replaced by a cheaper junior. I think we’re in for a reckoning across the industry as companies realize that there’s little difference between a lazy senior armed with Claude and a halfway motivated junior who has aspirations of growing into something more. The latter costs less and might grow into a better dev.

[mono442]

If the salaries fall then there would be no highly motivated juniors.

[le-mark]

Lazy senior vs motivated junior tension has always existed. I was one then became the other. I don’t see llm changing this dynamic!

[Aurornis]

> because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming

The productivity uplift measured in some of these reports is from more tasks being done, not from developers giving themselves more idle time during the day.

If we do see job losses from AI, my feeling is that it’s going to be concentrated in people with an attitude like this one where workers try to remain anchored to their old delivery pace. It’s becoming easier than ever to replace a worker in that position with a lower paid junior equipped with Claude who has an interest in learning. There’s no reason to keep a higher paid worker around to copy and paste between Jira and Claude.

[thin_carapace]

thats absolutely true regarding wysiwyg projects like a small website. aside from temporary cost savings, systematically ignoring institutional knowledge in favor of mass output is not gonna do humanity any favors ..

[Foobar8568]

Yeah institutional knowledge is hard to capture, even more with agentic coding.

I just compressed what would take a team a few months to deliver in one or two months, the amount of gotcha I spot from the existing system we work on everyday is staggering.

How to deliver and keep these feedback is difficult, the other teams are overwhelmed by other tasks, so any tickets or communications will be forgotten in a few months.

And as an external ressources allowed to use frontier model, I have a hard time to keep up with my own pace, and all that institutional knowledge will be lost both by my employer and client.

[alanwreath]

Could it also be that the phrase “using an LLM” is loaded in itself? Who is getting more velocity out of it:

- chat box interaction

- vendor harness user (the cursor / antigravity crowd)

- SDD Claude users

- bespoke harness creators who let it goooooooo

I mean we already know who’s using all the tokens and driving enough cost to make penny pinchers consider removing other “costs”